My Science Fiction

Orionblamblam

Orionblamblam

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Last summer I did something I hadn't done in 20 years: I finished a science fiction story. A published professional author read it, offered suggestions and declared it good for publication. I sent it on to Analog science fiction magazine in September, and yesterday I finally heard back: nope. No thanks. Nuh-uh.

Gah.

Anyway, I'm trying to decide where to go from here. Over the past few years a number of people have suggested that I self-publish my aerospace stuff on Amazon in ebook format. Might try that with sci-fi. But there are apparently a number of different ebook formats. Suggestions on just what/how greatly appreciated.

If you're interested in what I wrote, I posted a PDF with the first 6 (of 23) pages here:
http://up-ship.com/blog/?p=23540

Honest criticism welcomed.
 
1) The title gives too much away
2) I like the personal style
3) Where can I read the rest?

What was most important, I felt like I couldn't stop reading. It felt interesting and it was written in a well flowing way.
 
mz said:
1) The title gives too much away
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Don't be too sure...

3) Where can I read the rest?
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On my laptop. At this point I'm uncertain how to proceed, whether to try other publishers or what.

What was most important, I felt like I couldn't stop reading. It felt interesting ...
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Then you should read the rest of it, where things start to happen!
 
It's very, very, very rare that a work sells the first place you send it. Keep grinding through all the markets, one at a time, until one of them takes it or you perish beneath an avalanche of rejection slips. There's really no other universally-applicable writing advice besides that.

If you're not familiar with Ralan's market list, or Duotrope or others like it, that's a good first step.
 
After reading your first pages, I'd inquire at Fatntasy & Science Fiction (F&SF) or Asimov's. Your writing style seems closer to what they publish (although they don't pay as well as Analog).
 
I liked it! Sounds like a I'm sitting in a bar listening this mysterious guy tell his tale or possibly I'm debriefing the narrator and listening/trying to figure out WTF happened to he and his crew.

The setting is intriguing enough, especially the shear size of the place. Sounds like there should be maybe hundreds of thousands of residents if not millions aboard (care to comment?) and for something that big to go dark and show no signs of where they all went? Creepy....!!!!!

So yeah, where's the rest?! B)
 
CliffyB said:
Sounds like there should be maybe hundreds of thousands of residents if not millions aboard (care to comment?)
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I'm a fan of not explaining *everything* in a story... Gene Roddenberry once mentioned that on Star Trek they no more explained the functioning of a phaser than a cop show would explain a .38. That said... the idea is that the Station is a relatively new structure, and hadn't yet been fully populated. *That* said, the society I posit here is slopping over in resources (fusion is easy by now and the universe is full to overflowing with asteroids and comets ready to be stripmined). Thus building a station like this would be a relatively minor enterprise, so there'd be a *lot* of them and population pressures would be fairly low.
 
I hear you man. I was just left wondering if this was one of those big arse places that was designed to house a lot of people or one that only has a scarce few because it had other reasons for existing. Might be something to mention in the description of the complex rather than being left until later. Just my 2 cents and nothing else; its your story :)
 
Not bad, not bad at all. Almost sems like it'd fit into The Expanse, which in my book is definitely a good thing.
 
Not a bad start.

Getting stories critiqued by published, or professional, writers can be useful, but it can also have its drawbacks. A year or two ago, I had a short story (about a boy getting invited along on an alien sponsored air race) critiqued. Among the suggestions given were

Either set it in the 1950s, or have the kids texting all the time.

Non-WASP characters should have exotic names and speak with accents.

The lead character and his brother should be bickering all the time. And, they should argue with their parents most of the time.

Not enough of a pending world-doom threat.

Maybe that other racer should be trying to kill the kid and his pilot, not just trying to win the race. Something to make a higher threat level.

The suggestions she made would have changed my story to be more like the stories she writes, and taken it away from my original idea. I didn't choose her to critique it, I had submitted it for a critique session at the local science fiction convention and she was my luck of the draw.


On the e-publishing/self publishing suggestion. Self publishing used to seen as going to a vanity press as a last resort, which spoke of the worth of the story. However. That view has been changing now that some self published works have become marketing successes. If you do decide to go that route, take some time to really study the market and what you'd be getting yourself into. The last thing you'd want is to have your story become a hit then learn that your choices have led to your loss of control over it.
 
The Artist said:
, I had a short story (about a boy getting invited along on an alien sponsored air race) critiqued. ...
The suggestions she made would have changed my story to be more like the stories she writes,
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Fortunately, in my case the Professional Author provided critiques like "you keep repeating the same words/phrases" and "your lead sentence is boring, you need a hook right off the bat," stuff like that. Didn't change the story, but did improve the readability.

Lately I've been only pecking at fiction. One spectacular failure on my part was what was supposed to be a sub-page little scrap, to help liven up my Nuclear Pulse Propulsion book. Many pages in, I gave up on it. Far too ponderous, long, boring and not at all enlivining... quite apocalyptic. Posted it HERE. But I've gone back to the idea, and am working on "scenes" meant to be less than a page, for both the NPP book and the book that I hope to follow.
 
Still looking forward to it. Maybe Orion is not the future (I wonder what a remake of When Worlds Collide would be like though?) and then there's VISTA and Minimag concepts, not to mention the ponderously named "Inductively-Driven Metal Propellant Compression of an FRC Plasmoid" here: http://nextbigfuture.com/2012/04/fusion-propulsion-based-on-inductively.html


Don't give up too soon - we need to know!
 
Rhinocrates said:
Still looking forward to it. Maybe Orion is not the future (I wonder what a remake of When Worlds Collide would be like though?)
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A few years ago I started tinkering with the idea of writing a WWC screenplay. My idea was to update it for 100 years later than the book: collision in the mid-2030's. In the original novel, the big question was "Can we build a space ship?" In my version - which would try to stick as close as possible to the major plot points of the novel - the question would be "How many spaceships can we build?" Plus, the international intrigue... in my version, the incoming planets are detected well over a decade out, but this discovery is successfully kept secret for a number of years. Thus a few major powers have a head start. And a few other powers have an increasingly confusing series of incidents that shut down their astronomical and space launch capabilities...

Of course, once the news breaks, a lot of people are pissed, and try to cause a ruckus. But if the US, the UK and the Russian Empire are all aware from Day One and are busy working on arks, they're not going to have a lot of patience with the likes of the Caliphate trying to cause them problems. So... if you are the President or Putin 2.0, and you know that in six years the Earth *will* be destroyed, and that the only hope for mankind and our critters and out culture is that *your* projects survive... what's to hold you back from simply nuking the crap out of troublemakers?

But then I saw that Speilberg was working on a WWC movie of his own, and I abandoned my idea as stupid.
 
Whaaa... no mad/bad/Euro-Jew/Nazi/scientist/sexy-hottie?
- Ah, oops - belay that, wrong thread.. Woop Woop - Bannn... Alerrt... Bannn...Alerrt..

But seriously Obb,

& I respectfully suggest you get a copy of Joe Haldeman's '1968' - as a primer - on doing that
kindly type of geeky/techno stuff in an engagingly coherent format..

Good on ya for givin' it a go, but..
 
I wish there was a scifi / horror show in the vein of Outer Limits. :'(
 
mz said:
I wish there was a scifi / horror show in the vein of Outer Limits. :'(
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SciFi network is bringing The Expanse series to TV, with a rumored astronomical budget. Won't be Outer Limits but it'll definitely be sci-fi/horror.
 
Scott,

Thanks for giving me an excuse to seem diligently working at my desk, when I was actually enjoying a great story. I'm not sure why you got the "no thanks" but I will agree with those who say they could not stop reading it. I like the pace. I like the style and I like the hint of "Secret Project gone bad” innuendo.

Having also thought about writing the first thing I noted when floating about the Web was the consistency of the “expect to be turned down a lot” phrase. I think you should keep going with this. Maybe a series of short stories like this that you could link together in a good weekend read sized book.

I would buy it.
 
Thanks. I have several other stories in works at the moment with the same cast of characters. One is on it's *third* major iteration... not just revised, but earlier versions simply abandoned. Another is longer than "Mass Disappearance," and will probably be twice as long (until I go through it with a weedwhacker), and is probably the better story to serve as an introduction to these characters and their world. "MD" was not the right story to be the first one out, I think.
 
If you go with an introduction story I think you need to change MD some to take out the introductory descriptives of the characters. Honestly I think you hook readers real well with MD and you can go on with there lives and how they go on after the misadventure. Why they end up not together and such. I would stay away from the war though as military sf is really saturating the market. Me I want to read more about your truck drivers with interesting loads and locations. Maybe a bar fight now and again where having a hairy four armed friend might be handy.
 
yasotay said:
I would stay away from the war though as military sf is really saturating the market.
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These particular characters are not military, never will be. Civvies all the way. Of course, come The War, they'll be carrying military cargoes and such, but making every effort to avoid actual combat. Whether they'll succeed in that, you'll just have to wait and see...

Me I want to read more about your truck drivers with interesting loads and locations.
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That's mostly the plan.

Maybe a bar fight now and again where having a hairy four armed friend might be handy.
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Not *this* four-armed furry friend. In fights, he's useless.

One of the things I want to do different: rather than staffing the ship with square-jawed Heroes, or doughty Rebels, or intrepid Explorers or ingenious Scientists... I want to see what I can do with some regular schmoes who are actively trying to avoid excitement, but who happen to live in a time and place where whatever they do would be exciting to yahoos living in the early 21st century. For these characters, the rough equivalent of driving across the state would mean flying from one solar system to another. Boring for them, interesting for us. If, of course, I write it right.

Imagine a story where a guy is awakened by his digital clock, checks his email, hops a bus to work in the city, works with robots or something at a manufacturing plant, goes out for fast food for lunch, rides a maglev train home, nukes his supper, plays first-person shooters for a while, surfs some porn then goes to bed. Holy crap that'd be dull, and probably rather sad. Unless... you sent that story back in time 500 years. People would freak out.
 
Okay, so i've read and digested your stories, so here goes...

'Mass Dissappearance', loved it, very Lovecraftian...About the only negative thing I can see, is that there's no tie-in between what happened on Gunston Station and the events in space.You don't have to give everything away, but by the end of the story, the reader should be able to go 'Ah, so that's what it was...'.
And the "I thought it was a fair question" gag got a bit old after the third time...

Can't wait to read the rest of 'Launch', or whatever the full story will be called. The extra description really helps to flesh out the characters. From what I can tell, there's clearly a lot of you in Zane...
I like the idea of Loff being small, means he can get into all the little nooks and crannies, fixing stuff...and other things.
I'm assuming the other intelligent alien species are The Enemy...
And the view of the aurora's going to look great in IMAX 3d...

Quite intrigued by some of the tech...transporting people in a 'Storage Matrix'. Just their minds, or their bodies, too. Being able to use a Hyperspace Drive in-system is unusual, too.
Oh, love the star and planet names, too... ;)


cheers,
Robin.
 
robunos said:
From what I can tell, there's clearly a lot of you in Zane...
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Any resemblance between between me and any character I write is likely due more to a lack of creativity on my part than direct marysueing.


I'm assuming the other intelligent alien species are The Enemy...
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Nope. The third species, the "Narth," are akin to Loff's species in that humans met them once we get Out There, go, "Hey, neat," then blow right on by 'em. "The Enemy" are something quite different.

transporting people in a 'Storage Matrix'. Just their minds, or their bodies, too.
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Just their minds. Their bodies are kept stored in suspension back home,and new ones are grown (very likely something like 3d printed) at the destination. At the end of the tour of duty, the minds are re-uploaded, the printed bodies destroyed, and the matrix returned back home, and the new memories are uploaded into the old bodies.

Something *not* allowed in this world: multiple copies of an individual. Can be done, physically, but it's a Bad Idea. And as it turns out, it's a Really Bad Idea for anyone who tries.

Being able to use a Hyperspace Drive in-system is unusual, too.
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Well, the AU's do start to stack up.

Oh, love the star and planet names, too... ;)
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I was starting to wonder if anyone hereabouts would notice.
 
Any resemblance between between me and any character I write is likely due more to a lack of creativity on my part than direct marysueing.
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This.Is.Not.A.Bad.Thing.
You can always tell when a character has no basis in reality, as they're often just a caricature, or a stereotype.

Just their minds. Their bodies are kept stored in suspension back home,and new ones are grown (very likely something like 3d printed) at the destination. At the end of the tour of duty, the minds are re-uploaded, the printed bodies destroyed, and the matrix returned back home, and the new memories are uploaded into the old bodies.
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How difficult is the up/download process? I'm just thinking you've conquered death and disease here... Fried alive by a malfunctioning fusion reactor? taken a spacewalk without a suit? Contracted an incurable alien plague? No problemo! Just print out a new body, upload, and you're good to go. I would also think that the rich and powerful would have themselves 'backed-up', in case anything 'untoward' should happen... A final thought on this, could an uploaded mind be used to control a computer directly?? In other words, is it possible that 'George' the 'Aivatar' is really an uploaded mind, interfaced directly into the ship's systems...

cheers,
Robin.
 
I passed both pieces on to a work colleague of mine who's very widely read in terms of SF.
Their reaction was very favourable. Apart from not knowing what an AU, or an an O'Neil cylinder, or the L5 point was, (absolutely no scientific background whatsoever...) they said they thoroughly enjoyed both pieces, and want more...

cheers,
Robin.
 
robunos said:
Any resemblance between between me and any character I write is likely due more to a lack of creativity on my part than direct marysueing.
Click to expand...

This.Is.Not.A.Bad.Thing.
You can always tell when a character has no basis in reality, as they're often just a caricature, or a stereotype.

Just their minds. Their bodies are kept stored in suspension back home,and new ones are grown (very likely something like 3d printed) at the destination. At the end of the tour of duty, the minds are re-uploaded, the printed bodies destroyed, and the matrix returned back home, and the new memories are uploaded into the old bodies.
Click to expand...

How difficult is the up/download process? I'm just thinking you've conquered death and disease here... Fried alive by a malfunctioning fusion reactor? taken a spacewalk without a suit? Contracted an incurable alien plague? No problemo! Just print out a new body, upload, and you're good to go. I would also think that the rich and powerful would have themselves 'backed-up', in case anything 'untoward' should happen... A final thought on this, could an uploaded mind be used to control a computer directly?? In other words, is it possible that 'George' the 'Aivatar' is really an uploaded mind, interfaced directly into the ship's systems...

cheers,
Robin.
Click to expand...

See Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan for this exact thing.
 
robunos said:
How difficult is the up/download process?
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At the point in history of these two stories? Fairly simple, cheap, easy and reliable. It's no biggie, commonly done for transport taking more than a number of days on a limited transport. or when you want to take people from A to B and not have them blab to anyone else along the way.


I'm just thinking you've conquered death and disease here...
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In a sense yes. The technologies were developed centuries early, story-time... and promptly created havoc. By This Point In History, the issues have been resolved.

In other words, is it possible that 'George' the 'Aivatar' is really an uploaded mind, interfaced directly into the ship's systems...
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Nope. AI are extremely common, perfectly accepted members of society. But due to troubles centuries earlier, only a single *physical* model of AI is manufactured... a sphere about the size of a softball, with the general intelligence of a smart human. All built to the exact same blueprint, except for certain regions which are allowed to randomize during manufacture to produce distinct personalities.

I've pondered for *decades* how best to handle the ability of a society to just stamp out "adult" minds like this. The technology of the time would allow one person with a fabrication unit (think: "replicator") to stamp out AI's by the bajillions, and that would be *bad.* What I've come up with: in order to create a new AI, two other "citizen" AIs in good standing (AIs, like humans, sometimes go nuts, or turn criminal, because... why wouldn't they?) must request it. The new AI is then manufactured, and made an indentured servant, for lack of a better term, for 20 years. They must be treated like any other citizen, like an employee, getting proper pay and can't be abused, etc. But they must *work* a job in any of a number of roles. At the end of that time, they are free citizens, to go and do as they please, including swapping bodies (the AI brain being softball-sized, many might want to swap into android bodies of any possible configuration, others might want to sign on to giant starliners, others might want to just strap on a solar sail and go away).

I'm currently pecking away at two stories, but #3 on the list would feature two time frames: This Point In History, around 2500 AD, and around 2100 AD. This is not only important for the plot, it also allows for some ham-fisted exposition. One thing I'll hint at: technology as seen by Our Heros in these yarns probably seems somewhat stunted, especially for being half a millenium down the line. There's a reason for that.There's a reason why mind-copying *isn't* the answer to death, why people still wander around in Meat Bodies rather than float around as math and electrons in the Matrix or stomp across the universe as giant mechs or clouds of networked nanites. And it's not because these things are impossible or haven't been done...
 
The more I find out, the more I like... ;D

cheers,
Robin.
 
I've posted another little bit of fiction for readin' purposes:

Pax Orionis: a small scene

Pax Orionis: a small sceneThis is a snippet from what, if finished, would be a roughly novel-length work of alternate history, described in more detail HERE. In short, it's a world in which the Orion program was successfully developed, fielded, and served in a rather horrific World War III. What I've posted is a small incident from a decade or so after WWIII, as the Orion program takes an unexpected step.
 
I liked the Pax Orion extract and find the storyline interesting.
It was as well easier to read than the Sci-Fi you shared earlier.


If you go for it, count me in as buyer of a pdf copy.
 
I have only read the short preview you had posted originally, but I'd like to drop a word of encouragement. I thought it flowed well, and I'm not normally a reader of the sci-fi genre. I'll definitely look to read the whole thing as I get the time.
 
Just read all of these... really enjoyed them! Looking forward to the next ones ;D
 

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